


end of the road

by TemporaryDysphoria



Category: Lupin III
Genre: Ambiguous Relationships, Angst, Character Death, Character Study, Depression, Hurt No Comfort, Implied/Referenced Suicide, M/M, Non-Graphic Violence, Non-Linear Narrative, Suicidal Thoughts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-28
Updated: 2020-01-28
Packaged: 2021-02-27 10:42:07
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,069
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22445824
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TemporaryDysphoria/pseuds/TemporaryDysphoria
Summary: Jigen chokes down nicotine that feels more like home than his lovers arms, and he wishes it were different.
Relationships: Jigen Daisuke/Arsène Lupin III
Comments: 14
Kudos: 61





	end of the road

**Author's Note:**

> This is just an emotional whump because I needed to decompress some shiiiiit.

Has Jigen always been numb inside? He suspects so, although it's hard to pin down the exact moment -

Perhaps it was when he was young ( _so young_ ) when he watched his mother cry over his father's body riddled with bullet holes. Blood didn't smell like anything then - he didn't yet have a comparison. His mothers tears were salty like the sea. And when she finished crying, there was a part of her that Jigen never saw again, lost in the ocean that fell from her eyes. 

Perhaps it was when he first felt the heavy weight of a revolver in his hand. Maybe the kickback injured a nerve as well as his shoulder - started the slow descent, even back then. 

Maybe it was when he first picked up a glass of scotch, after lying his way into a bar ( _too young to be drinking, but no one around to care_ ).

"That's a mans drink, boy." Someone taller than him, bigger than him boomed.

He drank the rest, gritting his teeth against the bitterness. Swallowed past the burn. It didn't taste good, but it was a mans drink. And at 16, Daisuke Jigen was a man. 

_Man enough to take a life, but unable to legally drink in a bar. An irony never really forgotten, but fortunately for Jigen, nothing he was planning to do was going to be legal._

Maybe he was always heading down. Perhaps it was (like they say) inevitable. 

It didn't seem too far of a stretch to imagine that there wasn't another option. That the only way out was clutching a revolver, twin vices of nicotine and ethanol keeping him alive as surely as they were slowly killing him. 

Apathy is a strange, twisted, hateful place. It's full of scotch glasses just out reach. Cigarettes on every surface, but no lighter to be found. Years pass by and Jigen imagines he's probably dying from the inside out - just like his mother. 

When she coughed up blood it smelled like rust. No longer 7, Jigen has a comparison for it now. Her teeth, yellow from stains, even her skin carried the bright sickening hue. She reaches for the gin. Jigen walks out the door. 

Sometimes he can feel it. 

When he drinks too much, too fast, with not enough food in his belly. The whiskey claws at his insides, ripping layer after layer but never reaching the light of day. 

He lies in bed and wonders if there's any meaning to any of it. He hasn't been to church in years. His gut turns to liquid fire and he prays to a God he doesn't believe in to take him far away.

When he wakes he is alive and numb. The betrayal stings more than the alcohol ever did. 

Lupin is like a sun. He radiates energy. He's so full of life it's blinding and Jigen has to pull his hat brim down to shield his eyes. 

"I just want to see you without that hat one day?" Lupin says with a saccharine smile, as though Jigen isn't a mass murderer, isn't a hardened criminal, isn't irrevocably broken and held together with string. 

He pulls the hat brim down even further and accepts the smoke. Lupin, he thinks - might be a good thing. 

_The thing is - that too much of anything, even a good thing - is a bad thing_. 

If Lupin is the sun, then Goemon is like is like a sunrise. Muted at first, so Jigen doesn't realise when he lets him get close. 

Then, as time goes on he burns brighter and brighter. Highlighting his own brilliance even as he highlights Jigen's inadequacies with a light too bright, too harsh. A man with so much honour it bleeds from under his skin. A man with so much discipline even Jigen - who feels nothing - feels shame. He's the man Jigen could have been. 

And sometimes, when he burns the brightest of them all, Jigen hates him for it. 

Fujiko is a meteor, hurtling through his space on a course known only to herself. She shines bright as she barges through the atmosphere uncaring, leaving debris and heartache in her wake. 

She's the type of women he'd hate to love - if he knew how to love. 

Zenigata looks at him with narrowed eyes and he feels the unconscious urge to stand up straight. How tragically ironic, that the only man who seems to truly see Daisuke Jigen is the man who wants to lock him away forever. 

Pops stares at him as he stares down the barrels of police weaponry and Jigen _knows_ that he _knows._ He gives the call to lower arms and Jigen will run, but it will be the dejected escape of a man who has once again taken the easy road. A man who can only wish that the call was for 'fire' instead of 'stand down'. 

"Come to bed with me," Lupin says, drunk on wine and victory. "I'll show you a good time."

Words rise like ash in his throat. Reasons to say no, trickle down and die before they can reach his tongue. 

He fucks Lupin like he wants to fuck the emptiness out of himself. If he can just hit the peak hard enough, and fast enough, then maybe - just maybe, he can feel again. 

He doesn't and the shame burns through him deeper than any pleasure. 

Lupin curls around his body, sticky and sated. It's suffocating, claustrophic. Lupin looks up at him with wide, hurt eyes, and Jigen can't find the words he needs to hear. 

"It's not fair," he wants to say, "It's not fair for you to feel so much. When I can't feel at all."

He doesn't say anything. And to his disappointment, it doesn't even hurt. 

When he looks in the mirror, he's a shadow of the man he was. (Not that he can even remember the man he was to start with). He feels like a skeleton, whose layers are getting gradually peeled away by the weather, until there's nothing present but rotting flesh and crisp white bones. 

He coughs up familiar blood, and he can't tell if its from his chest injury or from something else. His ribs ache, but pain of any sort is a welcome pain - something to differentiate night from day, job from break, nothing from nothing. 

"I love you," Lupin says one evening, when they're by themselves - as though those three words have the power to fix everything wrong in the room. As though they'll take back Jigen leaping in front of machine gun fire with barely a thought. 

"I love you," he says again, as though repeating it will make it more real, more tangible, even though Jigen's right in front of him - taking up less space than he used to, but there nonetheless. 

"I love you," he says against closed lips, and Jigen lets him come close, lets him pull him towards the bedroom. Lupin fucks him like he's something precious - and if Jigen had any heart left, it would have broken it. Lupin fucks him like he can replace the emptiness with his own bright light and maybe he could have - once upon a time. 

Jigen chokes down nicotine that feels more like home than his lovers arms ( _is he really a lover though? If Jigen can't love? Won't love?_ ) and he wishes it were different. 

"You are on a slippery slope." Says Goemon sagely, full of knowledge and harsh truths - another man who sees through the thin veneer protecting the gunman from the outside world. 

Is Jigen truly falling if he never feels like he's been walking on flat ground though? Is he not just making his way slowly, but surely to his predetermined destination?

He gets painkillers for his back tooth. The strong kind, because he doesn't want to bother getting it pulled out. They come in a green box and written on the front in large letters they say " _Take no more than 4 tablets every 12 hours. Do not take with alcohol_ " 

Jigen takes 10 and drinks a bottle of whiskey. He wakes up in a pool of his own vomit - to Lupin's stony gaze. 

It doesn't hurt. 

He doesn't even feel ashamed now. 

The "I love you's" come thick and fast. Lupin throws them out haphazardly in a last ditch effort - hoping, probably begging for one to stick. 

"Go away Lupin," he says, with a voice like broken gravel, words scratching at the sides of his trachea as they race to be the first to be heard. 

"No" the thief says, and the man is nothing if not stubborn - Jigen has to give him that. 

"I don't love you," he says, aiming the barb for where he knows it will hurt. After all, Jigen is a hitman, an assassin, a criminal - he _knows_ how to hit people where its going to cause the most damage. 

Lupin swallows and fixes him with a steady gaze, "I've got enough for the both of us."

He should feel _something_ about a statement like that. Maybe pride, or fear, or love. Anything but this silent, cold numbness that creeps up his spine and twists into his chest. 

Lupin holds him tight, and even his radiant heat does nothing to stave off the ice. He could have loved Lupin, he thinks. _Could have._

_Maybe he would have?_

_Maybe he should have?_

He's on autopilot as they run through gunfire. Lupin is beside him, grin on his face from ear to ear as he leaps. Jigen's heart thunders in his chest as he runs, pulse rocketing around his body like a drum. 

The military don't fuck around, and the loud brassy staccato of machine gun fire is all Jigen can hear. The car is up ahead, idling. Lupin is a few steps ahead and jumps in, gangly limbs all over the place, looking back over his shoulder for the gunman. Jigen points and turns around, newly aquired assault rifle in his arms. The closest thing to a child he'll ever hold. 

In the movies Lupin loves to watch, they always show the hero facing up against incredible odds - valiant music in the background. 

There's no valiant music in real life. The sound of the car fades away as Lupin pulls around the corner - he'll be expecting to meet Jigen at the next block. 

_Jigen already knows he won't._

There's no valiant music as Jigen takes a step towards the men who outnumber him 30 to 1 - with ten times the firepower and body armour to boot. 

"Put down your weapons and we won't shoot," comes a voice across a loudspeaker. 

Gravity pulls at every part of Jigen's body it can reach. His fingers feel like lead, trying to rejoin the earth once more - dragging his limbs down joint, by joint. The voice rings out again. 

_Always repeating themselves, these men who want to save Daisuke Jigen._

A curious feeling accosts him. It starts in his chest, nothing but a flutter, a palpitation - brought on by stress, he would say. 

He looks down at his watch. Lupin should have made enough distance by now. The voice speaks again, but Jigen isn't listening anymore. He's done what he needed to do, and he's ready to face the consequences. 

He pulls the trigger, and the assault rifle spits fire. 

* * *

Something warm spreads out through Jigen's chest. He can taste coppery blood on his tongue and it reminds him of the time Lupin had kissed him hard after a fistfight over something so unimportant and dumb he can't even remember the specifics _._

"You idiot Jigen," Lupin had murmured against bleeding lips, and at the time Jigen had felt nothing. 

Now though, the memory feels warm. Like a blanket it settles over him and if he just closes his eyes, maybe he can melt back into that sweet, warm, comforting embrace. 

Maybe he did love Lupin? He thinks as he sinks further down into blissful darkness. For the first time in years he feels something other than blinding numbness seep through his veins, into the closed dark spaces of his body.

As quick as gunfire, something cold spikes down his spine. He opens his eyes but all he can see is inky black. His throat tightens and he tries to yell, but no sound escapes. 

For the first time in years Daisuke Jigen feels - _fear._

_Maybe he did love him?_


End file.
